Marathon
by lorcan
Summary: In which House is left shorthanded, a patient is predictably difficult to diagnose, and four doctors face the longest shift of their lives.
1. Chapter 1

Appropriate disclaimer applies.

**MARATHON**

* * *

The patient was about fifteen years old, had hazel eyes, light brown hair, and fair skin with a few freckles spattered across her cheeks. Looked well and in good humor despite the fact she was hospitalized for seizure and breathing difficulty, making small talk with the nurses and a few jokes with the doctors.

She had been allocated to House because she had no history of epilepsy or asthma, tested negative for any drugs, and presented with no infection. An MRI had revealed a slightly enlarged spleen, though not seriously enough so to cause alarm. It was not a fascinating set of symptoms, nor had they yet reached the point of desperation usually required to turf someone to the diagnostic department, but it was the day before Thanksgiving, after all, and most respectable staff were home with their families.

The staff that remained was mostly needed to handle the traditional assortment of pre-holiday injuries – car accidents from increased road travel, college students who had taken an inability to get home as an opportunity to drink themselves into alcohol poisoning, newly single dads with cooking-related injuries, and the goofballs who had fallen off roofs getting an early start on Christmas decorations. No one was convenient to take more than a few minutes to really study the teenaged girl, though someone had drawn blood earlier and she'd been promised a turkey sandwich if she was still around the following day. It was generally concluded that she'd end up in House's department anyway so she might as well go now, and House himself folded rather than involve himself in an extended confrontation with Cuddy.

Besides, the longer she stayed in his office the longer it would be before she went home, and he'd gone to such trouble to fill her sneakers with toothpaste.

House, down to one fellow for the holiday, didn't much care whether he had a patient or not. She wasn't acute and she wasn't interesting, but it would give Kutner something to chip away at for the next few hours and those were therefore hours House could have to himself.

Kutner, unfortunately, was in the lab fetching the bloodwork results, since the place was practically deserted and a rather tart telephone exchange between House and the overworked nurse had not produced the desired results. This required the surly doctor to actually visit the patient, since his other option was to trust the intake nurse's history, and he would have jumped through a fiery hoop before he trusted more than a small – and dwindling – group of people, and he would have eaten the hoop before he admitted to trusting that many.

On the other hand, Cuddy had given him partial – she stressed the _partial_ – use of Cameron and Chase to compensate for the brain drain caused by missing three quarters of his staff. Cameron had seen the patient in the ER and Chase had been looking after her since then, but neither had volunteered any information. Ah well, he had ways of making them talk…

"Miss…Hall. I don't see your first name on my chart – see, I knew there was a reason I was mean to the nurses."

"It's Tammany."

House actually stopped playing with his sucker.

"Your name…is _Tammany_ _Hall_?" His voice rose a half a note higher, as it usually did when sarcasm collided with disbelief.

The girl nodded, oblivious.

"_Kutner!_" House bellowed at full volume without a single change in position or facial expression.

Kutner, looking duly harassed, swung in around the door. "You know, they've invented these little boxes, you type a number into it and it beeps, so you don't have to call at me like a dog."

"Girl says her name is Tammany Hall."

"So?"

"_Cameron!_"

Cameron entered, looking reproachfully at her pager as if surely it had malfunctioned for a doctor to be yelling through the halls.

"_This_ girl says her name is Tammany Hall, and _this_ guy doesn't see anything wrong with that," House gestured to each offending individual with his lollipop.

Cameron smothered a smile. "Well…it _is_ an unusual name…"

House rolled his eyes. "For god's sake explain how we know she's a big fat liar."

"Tammany Hall was the name of the Irish city hall under Boss Tweed in New York in the 1900's," she obliged pleasantly, and wrote the name on the chart because House would not.

Kutner looked annoyed. "Now seriously, how was I supposed to know that?"

"Uh, study your history, dude," House affected a high schooler's bored tone. "Even Chase knows that."

"Know what?" Chase asked, tossing the question across the sterile floor of the hospital room towards his former boss but offering no other acknowledgment of the relationship three years of working together should have fostered. The intensivist checked a few IV drips and excused himself to the patient before putting a hand down to palpate her abdomen.

"Know what Tammany Hall is." Kutner couldn't quite keep the sulk from his voice.

"Irish city hall under Boss Tweed in New York in the 1900's," Chase recited easily, wording identical to Foreman's and accent at odds with the American history. He winked at his patient – who smiled the slightly goofy smile of the overly trusting – and left Kutner stewing. Somewhere along the line House had imparted to his former minions a few of his lesser parlor tricks, useless against House himself but endlessly amusing directed towards his new pets. Foreman preferred to crush the younger blood under the formidable impact of his superior intellect but Chase and his dry sense of humor weren't above a cheap shot like the apparent mind-reading, which came only from a quick glance at the patient chart, a snippet of overheard conversation, and a perfect deadpan delivery.

* * *

AN: As promised, I return with the new season! I have been reluctant to write anything for the new team because I was in denial that they were a permanent fixture in the show, for some reason I don't relate as well to them. Have compromised by writing them in a bit at a time, since one or two new characters at a time is more than enough for anyone. Hate Kutner least, so started with him, will work the rest into future stories. Sorry this section doesn't have an exciting ending, I don't write it in chapters and there wasn't a good place to break it up, but hope you enjoy!


	2. Chapter 2

_"Irish city hall under Boss Tweed in New York in the 1900's," Chase recited easily, wording identical to Foreman's and accent at odds with the American history. He winked at his patient – who smiled the slightly goofy smile of the overly trusting – and left Kutner stewing. Somewhere along the line House had imparted to his former minions a few of his lesser parlor tricks, useless against House himself but endlessly amusing directed towards his new pets. Foreman preferred to crush the younger blood under the formidable impact of his superior intellect but Chase and his dry sense of humor weren't above a cheap shot like the apparent mind-reading, which came only from a quick glance at the patient chart, a snippet of overheard conversation, and a perfect deadpan delivery._

_

* * *

_Back in the conference room, Kutner endured an awkward one-on-one differential session with his boss before Chase and Cameron took mercy on him and came up to join in. Cameron pitied the slightly younger doctor and wouldn't leave him to face House alone; Chase would have left any of the other members of the new team but liked Kutner well enough he agreed to come along.

"Symptoms aren't too unusual by themselves but they don't fit together and we can't find any reason she should have them," Kutner recapped dutifully.

"Car accident? Could've hit her head and caused the seizure, plus some blunt trauma for the spleen," Chase would've liked a nice bloody trauma to enliven his day.

"No, no car accident. Doesn't drive yet, doesn't play sports, doesn't ride horses, doesn't even play an instrument. Last injury she had was a broken wrist when she was eight, last time she was in the hospital was when she was born." Cameron leafed through a more extensive medical history she had, of course, been detailed to take.

"Neurological could've caused the seizure, brain tumor, cyst, something like that," Kutner again, though he knew already what Chase then reminded him.

"Would've shown up in the MRI."

"No infection in her bloodwork either," Cameron mused. "It could be a microtumor, on one of her glands."

"More likely a parasite with the enlarged spleen," House broke in, arriving fashionably late to his own party. "Where's she been lately?"

"Naples."

"Italy?"

"Florida."

"Hurricane?"

"Sunny and seventy."

House scowled. "Test her for whatever you can think of caused by sunshine and puppies." He said the word _puppies_ the way most people said the word _crackfiend_.

"Is her name really Tammany Hall?" House added, making Kutner scowl blackly.

Chase shrugged, Cameron rolled her eyes.

"She _says_ it is, we haven't been able to prove otherwise, but possible psych symptoms should stay on the list." Kutner was the designated spokesman in Chase's indifference, and Cameron's reluctance.

"At least if she's crazy she has a sense of humor," Chase added, chair rocked back on two legs.

"You're going to fall," Kutner remarked, hearing the chairback clink on the glass wall. Chase gave him a deeply unimpressed look and the Indian doctor piped down.

House was unconcerned by either his patient's potential insanity or his doctor's potential glass wall-related disaster. In point of fact he would prefer to spend his holiday shift without a case and being that there was one would have preferred them to go attend to it without him, but sending them away would no doubt trigger another visit from Cuddy, with whom he lately had very mixed feeling about interacting.

"Do a psych eval and a dye-contrast MRI."

"Looking for?"

"Microtumor, irregularity of some kind, whatever. Doctor stuff."

"Anything else?" Cameron tried to goad him into better behavior but knew it was an unlikely victory.

"See if you can find another symptom. Make it a good one."

"How do you propose we do that?" Chase asked, hoping for permission to do something unorthodox.

"Cut her open, stress her out, I don't care. You went to medical school. And somebody bring me a Reuben. Cameron knows how I like it." House must have been paying better attention than he appeared because he slid a file folder across the table with a dollar paperclipped to it, forcing Chase to jerk forward to reach for it. True to Kutner's warning he overbalanced on the two-legged chair and everyone flinched at the sound of his head bouncing hollowly off the thick glass behind him.

He took a split-second too long to recover and Cameron thought he'd really hurt himself, but fortunately neither the glass nor the intensivist's skull was cracked. His hand was bleeding down one finger from where he'd grabbed for a chair and sliced it on a screw, though mainly it was only his dignity injured.

House pumped his fist like a man scoring a goal as Cameron reached down to give her boyfriend an arm up. No stitches needed, when they checked, but a sizable wrapping of gauze to stop the bleeding and some paper tape to secure it to the next finger. Chase, embarrassed, found several minor procedures in other wards that required his attention for the next few hours.

Kutner was left alone to perform a stress test and a few scans with the aid of a rad tech in place of the littermates he'd become accustomed to. Thus cut off from his familiar, if thorny, support, he was surly and bored but did as instructed. The scans showed him nothing he hadn't found in the previous ones, and the stress test produced nothing but a slightly winded teenage girl with no new symptoms.

She was a good sport about it, considering she'd been at Princeton-Plainsboro now most of her day, with no better answers than the family doctor that had referred her. Tammany watched Kutner sympathetically as he took her vitals for the umpteenth time and tried to look as if what he was writing on his chart were in any way significant.

"Why are you here? Over Thanksgiving, I mean."

"Lost at Rock-Paper-Scissors."

He had, too, three times. Taub had gone home to his saintly wife, Thirteen had gone home to her questionable extracurriculars, Foreman had gone home to his empty apartment, and Kutner got to work the holiday double shift that first tripled, then quadrupled, and finally ground on endlessly into the clattering night like the mile-long Barnum and Bailey circus train.

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* * *

AN: As always, bite-sized for quick reading and frequent posting. Thanks to opals for the review, anyone else who wants in on the action is most welcome!

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	3. Chapter 3

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_Taub had gone home to his saintly wife, Thirteen had gone home to her questionable extracurriculars, Foreman had gone home to his empty apartment, and Kutner got to work the holiday double that first tripled, then quadrupled, and finally ground on endlessly into the clattering night like the mile-long Barnum and Bailey circus train._

* * *

Despite passing the stress test with flying colors Tammany seized again early that evening and brought Chase and Cameron back up from their usual posts on lower floors.

"You know, I _was_ off fifteen minutes ago," Chase remarked pointedly to no one in particular.

"Cuddy gave me partial use of the two of you while you were on duty. I interpret that to mean that while you're off duty, I get entire use of you. And you don't even celebrate Thanksgiving, pull up a chair." This last directed at the Australian who sighed and set his bag down next to his girlfriend's – Cameron had not even bothered to protest.

"Seizures could be related to a brain lesion. And there's always perineal plastic." The pretty immunologist could not quite control the ease with which she began a new round of DDX.

"I have scanned that girl inside and out," Kutner stated emphatically, shaking his head. "MRI, CT, X-ray, LP, the whole alphabet soup and nothing showed up. If she had a lesion _anywhere_, it would've showed on one of them."

"Are we absolutely sure there's no infection? Nothing like a few bacteria eating away at your brain stem to induce a seizure." It was Chase, this time, who was guilty of fluency of diagnostic medicine.

"You think she has syphilis? She's only fifteen."

"I saw'r a fifteen year old last week with two children, maybe she started early. Or maybe Daddy loves his little girl a little too much, messed her around when she was a kid," Chase shrugged.

"I talked to that dad, there is nothing in either of their behavior to suggest that he _ever_ did something like that to Tammany."

"What, and do pedophiles usually open to you about fondling their daughters during the patient histories?"

"Okay, okay!" Kutner had watched Cameron and Chase's ping-pong match and broke in before it got ugly. "I'll test her for syph, what else?"

House, still maintaining his laissez-faire approach to doing as little work over the holiday as possible, was privately amused by the way Kutner managed to steer two senior doctors more or less back on track without either of them noticing.

"Anyone broken into her house yet?"

"House, it's Thanksgiving," Cameron was a little shocked.

"Germs still work on holidays, so do you. Take one of the boys with you and be gone."

Kutner and Chase eyed one another for a moment and Kutner dug out a quarter.

"Heads," Chase called it, and lost. Kutner's face lit up for a fleeting moment; the gods of Rochambeau had made up for forsaking him earlier.

The intensivist resigned himself to a long night ahead, and Cameron, normal tiredness of serving a twelve hour shift apparent in her pale face, shrugged her coat back on to do the same.

Germs and the House team didn't take holidays, and neither, it appeared, did extended family visitations. Cars spilled out of the driveway the two doctors arrived in; the front door was open to show every light in the house on, and people in every room.

The pair almost turned around, but House would just send them back. Cameron rapped gently on the glass and let herself in, Chase a step behind. They were enveloped instantly by a bevy of aunts, and it was a moment before individual sentences were distinguishable.

"Who's daughter are you?"

"Come in, come in, it's getting chilly!"

"She must be Maureen's, she's got her figure."

"But he could be Stephen's son, look around the eyes."

Chase, hesitant to speak lest the accent give him away, nudged Cameron gently in the back.

"Hi, I'm Allison-"

"Oh, Allison, Bethie's girl, of course!" _Saved by the common girl's name_. "Married an Englishman, I heard, go ahead, introduce us."

"This is, ah, this is Robert…" Cameron tripped over the name and gestured vaguely behind her, difficult in the crush of older women and various young cousins filling the front hall. Chase tried not to wince – of all possible coincidences, Cameron had to be mistaken for the girl who had married an Englishman? _Aussies got no respect._

"Hullo, nice to meet you." His single line, spoken in his usual voice, since fewer people than he thought fair could tell the difference between British and Australian accents, elicited a few giggles and the sea finally parted.

They mingled and bluffed their way through to the bedrooms, where they interrupted the make-out session of a pair of teenagers who were hopefully not closely related. Fortunately the family had confined themselves mostly to the kitchen and front rooms, where there was as much food being served as if Thanksgiving were that night, instead of the next. Chase and Cameron made a decent inspection of the parents' room, then two more that appeared to be inhabited by a teenage girl and a youngish boy, Tammany and her eleven-year-old brother, respectively. None provided any gleaming clue, although a skin medication could have theoretically had an adverse reaction, and a few bowls of old cereal left lying around might have thrown off mold spores. The bathrooms were no more helpful; the plumbing beneath the sink was in good condition and in the medicine chests only a couple bottles of Tylenol, nearly full.

The garage housed the usual assortment of gardening supplies and tools. A few bicycles leaned against a far wall, no helmets in sight, Cameron noted. Pesticides within reach of either child in the family, so Chase bagged them as discreetly as he could. Cameron somehow managed to check under the sink in the kitchen, pretending to be looking for paper towels, and then had to extricate herself from an uncle of some ilk who had had one toddy too many and was regaling those around him with old war stories. Chase, while waiting, checked the closet with the hot water heater and air conditioning unit, and then ran into a cousin who had heard he came from England and wanted to compare experiences in London from a trip she had taken as a much younger woman.

_I've been to three pubs and the Heathrow airport_, he thought, but, as he'd once observed, he had a nice smile, and slid out of dodge without much trouble.

Cameron, when he was able to grab her elbow and steer them both towards the door, was holding a large sandwich and two cans of soda pop, plus the rapt attention of the woman she was now engaged in conversation with as if they had known one another all their lives.

They escaped, after a few hugs from long-lost relatives and well wishes for the road and their imagined trip back to wherever they'd come from. Chase was not the hugging sort, but he tolerated it well and was rewarded with half the sandwich and a can of Diet Coke when they reached the car. He grimaced at the too-sweet aftertaste of aspartame, allowed himself a heartbeat of regret that he had no memories equally as saccharine of times when relatives overflowed his home like they did Tammany's, and then applied his mind fully to the puzzle of their patient's declining health.

Night had fallen by time they arrived once more at hospital, bearing bags of samples from Tammany's house, and if Kutner, sucking down a high-torque coffee, had nothing good to report, at least he had nothing bad.

* * *

AN: Anyone reading this? Apologies for slow updating, busy life and all.


	4. Chapter 4

_Night had fallen by time they arrived once more at hospital, bearing bags of samples from Tammany's house, and if Kutner, sucking down a high-torque coffee, had nothing good to report, at least he had nothing bad._

_

* * *

_Approaching fourteen hours on duty, the three younger doctors were beginning to feel the first jitters of that particular brand of tiredness and nervous energy. An unfortunate combination, since it induced movement and chatter but not productive thought. Still, the night was relatively young for them and they could at least clear away the busy work of processing the chemicals and samples returned from Tammany's home.

Cameron and Chase went to speak with the patient while Kutner, who had spent the last two hours with her, betook himself to the lab to begin processing.

Tammany was still pleasant, relatively well-spoken for a fifteen-year-old, with an occasional hitch in her words as if she were momentarily distracted, which made Chase frown and jot a note in the corner of his forms. She was a good sport about being woken so late as well, silently proffering her arm for another blood draw until Cameron assured her they weren't there for blood.

It was onto midnight, but there hadn't been so much as a psych intern available, since that department, like all the rest, was on skeleton staffing for Thanksgiving and those that remained were fighting for their lives beneath an ever-growing pile of depressives and attempted-suicides – the uglier side of a holiday that stressed warmth, togetherness, and family. Cameron had gotten hold of a generic psych eval form, nothing as specific to their patient as any of the doctors would have liked, but it would do until a real shrink could see her.

"Tammany, I'm sorry we have to ask these questions now but if we wait you'll only get sicker." She didn't add that their boss didn't consider customary observances of night and day to be a reasonable excuse for failing to bring him the information he wanted. _Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West!_ The line filtered through her tired brain apropos of nothing and the immunologist shook her head to clear it.

"I know what it says in your chart, but it's important you tell the truth now if you didn't before. Have you ever used drugs?"

"I had some beer once," the girl admitted.

"But marijuana, ecstasy, anything like that?"

Tammany shook her head. "Nah, my folks would kill me."

Chase smiled slightly, reaching out to check the flow of saline and anti-seizure cocktail hooked up to her IV.

"How about school, do you get good grades, have any friends?"

"I do alright I guess. I used to get straight A's when I was a kid but since eighth grade I haven't done so good, mostly C's now. And yeah, I got a few friends, we're not wild party kids but we have fun."

"That's good. Have you felt sad or worried more than usual lately?" Despite the fact Tammany claimed her grades had slipped in the past year or so, she seemed satisfied with her friends, and Cameron began to doubt the girl was concealing some sort of self-harm or depression that could account for her current health concerns.

"Not too much. It's not great to be fifteen, y'know, but I get along okay. I don't have to worry about college applications for another couple years so I'm doing pretty good." There was no "great" or "happy" in any of the girl's descriptions of herself or her life, but as she had pointed out, she _was_ fifteen, an awkward age at best and "pretty good" seemed to be a reasonable expectation.

"Have you ever hurt herself, maybe with a razorblade or taking some extra pills?" A clumsier approach to a sensitive question than Cameron could normally be counted on for, and Chase looked at her in surprise; noted the tiredness in her eyes.

Tammany made a face. "No, definitely not. I knew a girl once who cut herself but I never really understood how you could make yourself do that. I get all nervous about getting paper cuts." A wry smile there, some truth to her statement since it was often the little injuries, a stubbed toe or a sudden paper cut, that hurt the worst.

Cameron was about to ask her next question – all variations on a theme, used mainly to determine anxiety or depression and not as relevant if Tammany suffered a more complicated disorder. Her parents had come in sometime earlier, Kutner had reported, however, and verified that the child's name really was Tammany Hall, so there was a slim chance that delusion played any role in her state.

Tammany was distracted by Chase's movement on her other side, glanced quickly over to where he was replacing a pen in his front shirt pocket.

"Hey, what happened to you there?" She gestured to the white bandage around his hand, less dramatic than it looked but unusual nonetheless to see a doctor injured.

"Ah, just caught me finger on a nail earlier, nothing too serious." Chase smiled warmly at the patient in thanks for her concern, although he was embarrassed to be reminded of the chair incident, and glanced guiltily at Cameron.

Cameron wasn't looking at him; she was staring in some alarm at Tammany. Chase refocused on the girl and saw for a fleeting moment what had upset her.

"Tammany, could you look over here at me for a second?"

She obliged.

"And now back at Doctor Cameron?"

Again, she complied, and now there was no mistaking it. Tammany's eyes had moved separately – one following Chase's instructions and the other following a split section later, jittering like it fought the muscles that controlled it.

Whatever ailed her, it was in her brain, confirming definitively that none of them would make it home for Thanksgiving.

* * *

AN: Still slow to update, apologies; story's fighting me. Thank you to my reviewers, as always, I love to hear back. If this piece seems a little lack-lustre, it's because I'm prone to writing flowery character studies and am trying to curtail that impulse, since there's only so much of that sort of thing one can read. Please review, it'll pick up from here, I promise.


	5. Chapter 5

_Whatever ailed her, it was in her brain, and none of them would make it home for Thanksgiving._

_

* * *

_Thanksgiving had come with the stroke of midnight, Cameron made a half-hearted attempt to draw attention to it with a lift of her Styrofoam cup but only succeeded in winding them all more tightly.

House was not in the best of moods, despite having left them all remarkably well alone more of the night; he had spent the time in Wilson's office, and with Wilson departed for home his only choices were to rejoin the diagnostic efforts or hang around Cuddy. A month before he would have sought her out for some pointless mind games, but a decade-long balance of animosity and sexual tension had lately become awkward, touchy and maudlin, all from one moment of want and weakness – or strength, depending on who you asked. That being the case he was reduced to the company of the three younger doctors, and not too pleased with this option.

"Anyone have any answers yet?"

"We've got her seizures under control," Chase offered without any illusions that this would please him.

"On the other hand she's got some sort of strabismus, we've induced both eyes to wander when the other is focused on something else." Kutner was privately interested in this symptom, both as a new puzzle piece and as a medically unusual manifestation.

"Both eyes? Strabismus only affects one eye," House snapped.

"Hence why I said _some sort_ of strabismus. She has no childhood history, so something's changed recently in her brain to cause it."

"She wear glasses, contacts? Some ophthalmologist a little heavy with the pen and whammo, kid's prescription is pulling her eyes out of alignment."

House had faith in nothing if not other people's incompetence. He earned two unblinking stares and Cameron's deep sigh.

"She doesn't wear glasses."

"She also doesn't have a brain tumour, micro or otherwise," Kutner added.

"But her grades have slipped in the last year, maybe she's having neurological decay," Cameron consulted her notes.

"Or she's fifteen." Chase's time under House had given him an argumentative edge at times. It made him a better diagnostician, but only the accent saved him from being a more abrasive person.

"She doesn't do drugs because her parents would be mad, you think they'd be happy if she didn't study?"

"I think teenagers get distracted by their social lives, drivers' licenses, and every piece of electronics in existence."

"She's too young to drive."

"She's not too young to play computer games or have sex."

"I tested her, she doesn't have any STD's, so it doesn't matter if she's having sex, if she is it didn't give her anything that'd cause brain damage," Kutner interrupted, again smoothing over what had potential to move quickly from a medical argument into a personal one. It was wasn't that Cameron and Chase didn't care for one another, just that back in their old roles as House's fellows, they couldn't help but apply pressure to the fault lines til one or the other broke.

"So this leaves us with the theory that video games are rotting her brain?" It was difficult to tell whether House was oblivious to, or had deliberately set up, the irony that he had to talk over the music of his handheld Playstation.

"It's not video games. I still think there might be an infection." Cameron, going with what she knew best after allergies.

"Her liver's been enlarged for a while, a couple months at least, maybe it threw a clot and she had a ministroke," Chase backed down and tossed out a new theory.

"Dead patch would've shown on the MRI." Kutner, having performed as many scans as he could possibly think of, some more than once, was slightly offended.

"A _very_ mini-stroke," Chase deadpanned. Cameron silently passed him another coffee.

"Cameron, go check her for signs of stroke. She's probably our expert on 'very mini', wouldn't you say, Chase?"

Chase actually had to knock his injured hand against the table edge to cause himself enough pain to not go after House.

Tammany slept through the early morning hours but her doctors did not; sifting through what little they had and bringing their combined intellect, no small thing, despite what House said, to bear on the meagre symptom list they had.

An eighteen hour shift, while unpleasant, was at least was not unheard of. Tammany slept and no alarms sounded to signal disaster.

Hour 24 began to press on them with the continual knowledge of missed sleep and insufficient food. Despite medication, Tammany suffered two seizures and a respiratory arrest, and her liver function declined. House ordered several risky tests, Chase performed several more. Cameron and Kutner painstakingly re-read records in the vain hope some previous unseen clue or pattern might emerge.

Now all three junior physicians were sniping at one another – even Kutner, usually allergic to confrontation. House had failed to talk himself into going to see Cuddy in time, and she too had gone home hours before. This put him temporarily in an even crankier mood than before, but his fellows' creeping exhaustion lent them enough ill temper to hold their own, and he was pleased enough by this to maintain homeostasis in his familiar pseudo-angst. _Misery loves company. But if it has company, is it so miserable? Misery loves company so it can make the company miserable and not be miserable itself?_

"Who in god's name gave me decaf?" House demanded. "Have you no shame?"

Hour 36 forced them all to admit privately – though not to one another – that they were exhausted. Cameron made another several pots of coffee, out of old habit, and House didn't even make a gender-role joke.

At least Cuddy was back, and she took pity on the underlings and sent a nurse up with cafeteria sandwiches, but though they hadn't eaten in nearly a day, not even Kutner had the energy for an appetite. Tammany's liver was in poor shape and she had had periods of altered mental state. Tempers frayed as consciousness grew slippery.

* * *

AN: Still not going over too well, I see. Oh well, a few more chapters left to go and then I'll write you all another flowery character piece.


	6. Chapter 6

_At least Cuddy was back, and she took pity on the underlings and sent a nurse up with cafeteria sandwiches, but though they hadn't eaten in nearly a day, not even Kutner had the energy for an appetite. Tammany's liver was in poor shape and she had had periods of altered mental state. Tempers frayed as consciousness grew slippery._

_

* * *

_Chase, with no direction from on high and with no better plan, resorted to CT scans as a sort of maintenance, to see what had changed since her last one, and more importantly since her last seizure. Something had clearly developed further, and if it was too small to see – likely, since her brain was affected – it would be a difficult process of elimination to find it.

He wasn't necessarily the most qualified to perform the test, since they could all hit a button and read a screen with equal facility, but since in the days of his own fellowship under House he'd been charged with most of the invasive tests, the less invasive ones tended to drift his way as well. One or more of the others usually tagged along, but it was the Australian doctor who most frequently sent the patient into the tube; who scrutinized the image slices that bloomed on the monitors – sometimes in colour but just as often in black and white, feeding speculation amongst his colleagues that greys were as good as reds and greens to him. He'd never confirmed or denied it; would have answered the question truthfully had it been put to him but it never was, so he dressed as he pleased and set the contrasts on the screens according to his own whims and let the rumour mill continue making grist of whether he was colourblind or merely had questionable taste.

This time it was Cameron who sat with him in the glass-walled booth to watch the other screen as the patient lay motionless on the gurney outside. Her pupils were blown wide in the low light, a bluish cast on her skin from the electronics surrounding them. Chase looked tired enough, blond hair, beginning to curl from its length, in more disarray than usual, eyelids at half mast as he leaned on his hand, but Cameron looked worse.

Like most men of a certain type, the intensivist was difficult to assign to a precise age and the same face that muddled his years shadowed his stronger feelings. Cameron, on the other hand, was a pretty girl, and her youthful features had always betrayed more readily her emotions than the others' did. Now they showed a doctor of twenty-seven or so who hadn't slept in nearly three days, and who, those same features warned, would not be able to tax her body indefinitely before the mileage showed.

Now her presence in the CT room was a mere formality – the appearance of work because they could not manage the real thing. Chase was capable of reading it himself, and it would be the task of all three to compare the previous results with the new ones shortly, so Cameron permitted herself a few scant moments of daydreaming in place of any kind of rest. The CT hummed, most of the noise blocked by the thick glass. It was a marginally less alarming sound than the MRI, which could best be approximated by crawling inside a metal trashcan and having a friend beat it with a baseball bat. Still, it required the patient to be still and silent, and the dim, futuristic lighting lent a touch of science fiction.

Watching the images stutter-step their way through Tammany's body, Cameron wondered vaguely how this test she now took for granted would have seemed to doctors only a generation or two ago. Chase's father had worked most of his career before such technology was commonly used, and even House and Cuddy, a few years apart one way or the other, were themselves a decade or more older than the first real CT machine.

Tammany's face was visible in profile across the room, pale in the low light. Who could imagine that beneath fair skin and dark hair, behind blue-green eyes and firm flesh, squirmed the glistening organs Cameron could now see in static splotches on her screen like a neon Rorschach? She rubbed gritty eyes and tried to refocus herself on what those pictures meant, tried to be as engrossed in them as her boyfriend six feet away, but the sleepy philosophical bent would not be shaken.

It was a floaty sort of stream of consciousness that made her think, tiredly, of the CT and how it could see things that once old-fashioned cameras could only wonder at, made her think of the flashbulbs they had once found in a patient's apartment and for a moment she was on the verge of tears, for to produce an image a flashbulb must shatter forever – not unlike Cameron felt, destroying herself to provide one more answer.

"Did she say she was having trouble in school?"

It took a question in an Aussie accent to bring her fully back to wakefulness, or as near as she could manage, and she nodded, rubbing the back of her neck.

"She said her grades had dropped in the past year or so but she didn't seem that worried about it. I think her parents are a little disappointed their daughter's just a mediocre student but they say she studies and does her homework so they couldn't complain."

"I don't think she is a mediocre student." Chase flicked the mouse wheel to return to a brain slice that had caught his eye. Cameron cast him a look that clearly questioned his standards.

"Her eyes mean it's neurological, what if it's been in her brain longer than we thought?" He traced a pale finger across the screen, the closest his sharp but science-oriented mind would ever get to artistry.

"She could be suffering a general neurological degeneration. It would have been going on gradually since she was a kid, her grades have dropped because it's reaching critical mass."

Cameron looked grim. "If that's true, it's only going to get worse. Some freak strain of Alzheimer's?"

"I don't see any plaques. But there's a few areas here that aren't showing the activity they should. It's very slight, you have to be looking for it." Now that he pointed it out, Cameron saw it too, not the white globs that marked Alzheimer's in the elderly, and, curiously, Down Syndrome, but a vague darkening of regions that should have been bright as Christmas trees, a minuscule shrinking of what should have been plump and vital.

"Well let's get her out and go regroup. It's your turn for coffee. And House has probably eaten Kutner by now."

"Nah, he got banished to the lab. House went to talk to Cuddy." Chase reached over to switch on the microphone and then thought about what he said.

"You're right, he'll be lucky if he's only eaten. Too bad, he was growing on me. Okay Tammany, you're all done, just hang tight another minute while we get you out." This last sentence into the microphone. Tammany waved to show she heard.

A CT doesn't require insertion into a tube like an MRI, but it does orbit the patient, so they had to retract the equipment, then gently gather up her IV tubes so they wouldn't tangle or tear out. Cameron wheeled Tammany back – over protests that she could walk; no seizure patient was allowed under their own locomotion, no matter how persuasive – and Chase took his turn forking out for life-sustaining coffee.

Kutner was not dead, but he had had a fairly epic shouting match with House himself, in which House was accused of being afraid of life, death, pleasant emotions, and Lisa Cuddy, and Kutner was personally fired no fewer than three times. Both Cameron and Chase were sorry to have missed this for their own separate reasons, none of them totally altruistic. In their absence, and the wake of the minor squall, House and Kutner had settled down into the relationship of two people sick of being married to one another, throwing mean-spirited barbs at the other whenever possible, none of which landed because they were each too busy thinking about what to say next that the insults never registered.

Coffee was passed round and Chase pointed out the slight abnormalities on the scan.

"Could she have had a stroke? Not recently but years ago?" Kutner fidgeted and rubbed his eyes with a fist like a toddler.

"Accounts for the seizures but not the liver problems," Chase shot him down almost apologetically.

"Stroke and hepatitis?"

"It's not Twenty Questions, Kutner, pretend like you've ever diagnosed a patient."

"Actually I was pretending I cared about the patient, want to trade?"

Cameron winced, Chase smirked. Neither was stupid enough yet to ask what had happened with Cuddy, though they'd get closer before they got farther.

* * *

AN: In case anyone knows medical trivia, while I claim House and Cuddy are older than the CT, in point of fact they are just older than conventional CT usage. A primordial form of CT was actually invented in the early 1900's. It was not, however, practical for use until 1971 at the Mayo Clinic, and even then it was several years before it became a mainstream technology. It is also entirely true that the brains of people with Down Syndrome show the same plaques found in Alzheimer's sufferers. While virtually identical in appearence and composition, they have related but not identical effects: in brains with DS they develop in infancy and early childhood and inhibit brain development; in Alzheimer's, obviously, they develop much later in life and gradually destroy memory and brain function. So far neither psychology nor medicine has managed to explain the disparity.


	7. Chapter 7

_Cameron winced, Chase smirked. Neither was stupid enough yet to ask what had happened with Cuddy, though they'd get closer before they got farther._

_

* * *

_"This isn't even my job…" Chase groaned, scraping himself off the tabletop where he desperately would have preferred to lean his cheek on the cool glass and fall hard into sleep.

Cameron squeezed his shoulder briefly but sympathetically. They had done the DDX dance for nearly two hours and what was, with them, usually a perfectly timed minuet, had lost all grace days before and wound up as the Electric Slide at a junior high.

Chase's finger throbbed and that, at least, had enough of a hook in his brain to tug him back to the light. It also had the effect of reminding him with a trace of guilt of Tammany Hall herself.

The girl was truly very sick, and had been for some time, though it had been growing insidiously in hidden parts of her brain and probably elsewhere in her body until now. Dramatic symptoms like sudden blindness or crippling headaches got all the glory for brain problems, but it was not always so obvious as that, and lacking such red flags, what thirteen-year-old would really notice when studying became just slightly less effective or their vision a touch blurred?

At least Tammany's parents had been good sports about the apparent spinning of wheels by the diagnostic department. An elusive diagnosis would have been compounded a thousandfold by anxious or demanding parents hovering over them every step. These two, however, continued to accept the news of incremental progress with good grace, taking turns visiting their daughter, and bringing her younger brother and a good many relatives to eat the promised turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving evening. Kutner had been perplexed at Chase and Cameron's sudden urgent need to be in other wings of the building for several hours that night, but covered for them as best he could in front of the cluster of aunts and uncles.

Thanksgiving had long gone by now, not that any of them had noticed. Tammany's symptoms refused to combine themselves in any meaningful way to the three younger doctors, House remained fractious and aloof, and every minute that passed was another brain cell dimmed in their exhausted brains.

Kutner had stretched out across three chairs, one elbow crooked across his eyes to block out the light and covering a face that was now grey beneath the tan. Cameron and Chase suffered too, drawn in against their will and now paying the price. Chase's eyes were streaked with the bloodshot feathering usually reserved for the truly drunk or the deeply crazed. He slurred his words more thickly than usual and had twice called someone "mate." Cameron's face, like Kutner's, was ashen, every nerve in her body trembling from a diet consisting now solely of caffeine. Not a single lab coat was in evidence, and they all wore scrubs because somewhere around hour thirty they had all been forced to march down in shifts to the showers to wash two days of wretchedness from their skin and let icy water pound a few moments of clarity into their leaden brains.

They had all but memorized the casefiles that sat open in front of them nonetheless. Kutner's was facedown over his chest because he could see the words on the insides of his eyelids no matter what he did to erase them. Cameron was re-reading test results with such painful slowness the others couldn't watch, and Chase had been staring at the flyleaf with the girl's name printed on it for half an hour, until it had assumed that existentially odd appearance any English word does if examined long enough. The letters irritated his throbbing brain until he could take it no longer.

"Tammany Hall. What a damned stupid name, can't you lot use real names anymore?" He burst out, venting on foreigners what he could not blame on an inanimate medical chart.

"We can't all be named Robert," Kutner deadpanned from beneath his arm.

Chase couldn't see him at that angle but glared in his general direction with eyes so bloodshot they looked faintly violet, and was about to make some retort about how he felt about people named _Lawrence_ when House's graveled voice interrupted.

"Don't blame all the Yanks, Chase, just the Irish. Tammany Hall was Ellis Island territory, remember."

"Must have skipped class the day we covered that in Victoria territ'ry history," Chase ground out acidly, naming his home state in Australia and betraying his bad temper in an accent so thick House was forced to ignore him.

"Is she even really Irish?" Kutner mumbled. He didn't much care either way, but his brain had lost the power to make his mouth stop talking.

"Must be, or the parents are history buffs," Cameron sighed.

"Which is it?" House said sharply, a sudden stiffness in his lank posture. He was greeted by four dead gazes in four blank faces.

"Oh come on, this girl's been dying upstairs for three days and Cameron hasn't talked to the parents? Pigs will fly 747's first. Are they Irish or aren't they?"

"They're from New York…" came the helpless answer. "Hall's not an Irish name and they don't have accents."

"Do they look like university professors?" House, now that he had an idea, was unsympathetic to her listless tone.

"If they don't, does that mean they _are_ Irish or they _aren't_?" Kutner again, no real interest evident in either the patient or the Irish, but then his voice usually lacked affect anyhow.

"Are. Either one of them teaches history and got their nerdy little rocks off naming a kid Tammany Hall, or they're Irish. Last name is meaningless, there's thirty million people of Irish descent in the United States. At that rate we're going to have to fumigate."

"Whatever happened to the idea that either the girl or the parents are insane?" Kutner mumbled from beneath the table. No one answered him because no one else could string enough words together.

"Fifty bucks says their name used to be Houlihan. Or O'Halloran. Go, find out."

"Find out if their name was Houlihan." Cameron repeated him without making it a question because she couldn't quite believe he had actually instructed her to do it.

"Well they won't be able to understand Chase," House replied as if this were only reasonable.

A heavy sigh from the young female doctor, and Kutner's hand shot up with a five dollar bill in it from beneath the edge of the table where he still lay on the chairs.

"Four sugars."

It was well understood by this point that whoever left the room must return with coffee or die.

* * *

One more chapter left!


	8. Chapter 8

"_Find out if their name was Houlihan." Cameron repeated._

_A heavy sigh from the young female doctor, and Kutner's hand shot up with a five dollar bill in it._

"_Four sugars."_

_It was well understood by this point that whoever left the room must return with coffee or die._

_

* * *

_The parents were understandably perplexed at their doctor's apologetic questioning of their lineage, but, like the entire team, were too tired to do anything more than respond automatically to the stimuli put to them.

"Her name? I'm sorry, I thought you'd noticed by now, but I guess signatures are a little hard to read anyway. We pronounce it the same but our last name is really Holl, with an O. I think it used to be Höl, with those little dots on the O, but you know how that stuff gets Americanised. Tammany's named after her grandmother, not the place in New York. It's an unusual name but it _was_ my mother's," Tammany's father explained, producing a business card that clearly spelled his surname H-O-L-L.

"Tammany started spelling it with an A instead of an O when she was in grammar school, I don't know if she didn't like people saying it wrong or if it was just one of those funny things kids get in their head. She's done it ever since, we've been used to it for years," Mrs Holl admitted, smiling faintly in amusement at the residual memory of better times. Her husband nodded behind her and squeezed his wife's shoulder.

Somewhere Cameron managed to feel a faint prick of victory that at least House had been wrong.

"Thank you both, I'm sorry to ask personal questions so late."

Mr Holl shrugged diplomatically. "The usual questions haven't helped, might as well try some unusual ones."

Cameron took herself away with another wan smile, to report back to her colleagues with coffee and confusion.

"The mystery of her name is solved at least, the parents are named Holl-with-an-O. Tammany changed hers to Hall-with-an-A."

House narrowed his eyes and took a long pull on his hot beverage, not yet defeated.

"Draw some blood."

"What are we testing for?" Useless to protest, though Kutner knew it was his turn to go through the motions.

"For blood. Do a DNA test. Genome database takes too long, compare it to Cameron's and Chase's."

"Oy, what for?" The prospect of Kutner sticking a needle in him, at least, roused the Australian doctor, though it wouldn't be the first time House violated his genetic privacy.

"Because you've very conveniently had your genes isolated Down Under for a good three or four hundred years. I need some nice bland Caucasians," House smiled wickedly.

"So test yourself or Wilson."

"I am not bland!" Cameron retorted, pitch rising.

"Wilson's Jewish, and one of the perks of being boss is I don't have to use myself as guinea pig. And Kutner's brown."

"The ladies like the dark meat!" Kutner called up, unphased.

"My dad was Czech," Chase protested, an edge of petulance in his voice because he was irritated that he'd been driven to mention his dad to thwart House's invasion of his background.

"Hard to argue the ethnic diversity card when you've got blond hair and blue eyes, but good try."

"My eyes are green," Chase mumbled into his coffee cup, not because it was true but because he couldn't stand to let House have the last word.

"What are we looking for by comparing Tammany's blood to Cameron's and the white guy's?" Kutner earned a rare frown from Chase but a smirk from House.

"What's comparing an Irish kid to an Australian and a whatever Cameron is going to show? Nothing different about any of us but gender, you think she's secretly a boy?" Chase, acerbic in his irritation.

"I think she's Swedish. Even if they've lost touch with the fatherland over the last couple generations, genetically they're just Germanic enough to carry one of the main hereditary conditions. You're right, I picked you for the Czech dad, either way she'll have more in common with you than with a WASP like Cameron."

"Kid's named after a famous Irish landmark so we never considered any non-Irish ethnic disorders," Kutner mused aloud. Only haemochromotosis ran in Celtic bloodlines – product of a strain that didn't know it could stop conserving iron now that the potato famine was over – and Tammany had demonstrated none of those symptoms.

"Assumptions make an ass of you and me. Except, in this case just you – I've been told I was already an ass," House remarked with feigned thoughtfulness.

"Anemia, disorientation, respiratory failure, splenomegaly, that thing with her eyes, if it's an ethnic disorder it must be Gaucher's." Kutner slid in his redeeming contribution, though the others had already reached the same conclusion. "Which type, do you think?"

"I'm guessing one of the two that doesn't kill you in infancy. Come on, mate, let's go find out if we get to tell her it's the one that kills you as a teenager."

With a little more verve, though not much, the four filed out. Kutner collected blood, as directed, from the patient. He also collected samples from Chase and Cameron, a little dry-mouthed because Cameron managed to be relatively patient even when exhausted, but Chase might well deck him for doing it badly.

They ran the appropriate DNA tests – Chase ran his twice because his vision was blurring so badly he titrated incorrectly the first time, and Kutner printed twenty-five pages worth of junk data before realizing he was on the wrong computer screen. Although Cameron protested vehemently the gross oversimplification of genetics, Chase and Tammany's DNA did bear some key similarities that the patient should have shared instead with Cameron if she was of Irish, or, in fact, any strain of lower Anglo extraction.

And that left Kutner to report back to House what was, for all of them, the last kick in the gut after being beaten into submission by their marathon shift.

"Type III Goucher's. She's fifteen already, with enough care she may live to be twenty-five."

There was silence in the room, House because he had known he was right and now had nothing further to say, the others because the payoff to their inhumanly marathon day was the discovery that their patient would die despite all the efforts of modern medicine, and they could scarcely stand such insult added to injury. Chase dropped his chin down towards the arms he had crossed defensively over his chest and Kutner stared dumbly at nothing. It was Cameron, predictably, that could not keep her feelings within.

"It's not fair. Two people each happen to have some stray gene from a distant relation and manage to meet and have a daughter who gets both? She ends up with a fatal heritable ethnic disorder because somewhere a few generations back, Mom and Dad had a Viking grandmother," Cameron all but whined, tiredness overcoming logic.

"Well the good news then is she's got a brother, Mom and Dad will have one kid left." House, unsympathetic and unrepentant. His long face showed deeper lines than usual, but it was hard to say if it was really disappointment or just the long hours.

Cameron looked momentarily stricken and then the old reflex of dismissing House's insensitivity kicked back in. She always hurt later, but in front of him and others was not the time or place. Her face smoothed to its customary wistful determination.

"Let's put together a treatment plan for her and then I'll go tell the family…"

She slid a legal pad from somewhere amidst the wreckage of Chinese food boxes and discarded coffee cups on the conference table, and none of the others had the heart to refuse.

House, of course, stalked off to his office, but, in testimony to his own level of exhaustion, contented himself with a roll of the eyes and a dramatic removal of himself from the room. He'd have slammed the door if he could, but the automatic hinges on the heavy glass plates thwarted him.

It took a couple more hours to detail a satisfactory plan for future treatment for Tammany. It wasn't their job, not really, but other doctors had already failed to help the girl, so to release her now with nothing but a diagnosis of a rare disease and a few pamphlets would be to cut the family loose from the only source of help they had managed to find thus far. A specialist was recommended, a few medications prescribed, a packet of literature gathered and a frank assessments of what Tammany could expect in the next few years written.

Gaucher's was, in basic terms, an enzyme deficiency which resulted in fat storage in the bone marrow and various organs. This in turn led to multi-systemic malfunctions. Gaucher's came in three flavours and varying degrees of severity, none of them particularly desirable but some more treatable than others. All included enlarged liver and/or spleen, bone lesions, anemia, and neurological problems.

Type I, mainly affecting the liver, spleen, and skeleton with virtually no brain involvement, could present severely enough to seriously limit lifespans, or mildly enough that sufferers could live into their forties or fifties, or even be unaware of their condition. It was found largely in the Jewish community, but spared mercifully more lives than the dreaded Tay-Sachs. Type II, on the other hand, with immediate and severe neurological symptoms, killed infants before the age of two.

Tammany had Type III. It was an even mix of the first two types which became noticeable in childhood and sometimes the teenage years, and resulted in the typical liver-spleen enlargement and respiratory difficulties, plus a milder but steady neurological degeneration that caused seizures and a breakdown in muscle coordination. Lack of coordination in the eye muscles, called ocular apraxia, explained Tammany's curious double wandering eye. Oncoming dementia – sometimes mild, sometimes moderate, another genetic dice roll – explained her gradual slide in academic performance, and she could expect to develop muscle twitches and serious anemia in the next few years if that development was not already underway. Impaired liver function would also tint her skin and the whites of her eyes brown, and severe osteoporosis would warp her long bones into Erlenmeyer flasks.

There were treatments for its symptoms, good ones, but one way or another, a Type III Gaucher patient's clock ran out well before the age of thirty.

All of this they wrote down and explained in clinical detail, trying as always to balance gentleness with honesty. And, when Cameron rose, as she had promised, to go inform Tammany and her parents of their diagnosis, Kutner and Chase rose to go with her.

It was by now as much a blow to Cameron, Chase, and Kutner, and to House who had watched them deteriorate, because for almost four days they had run on their little hamster wheels of medicine, until their worlds irised smaller and smaller to encompass only Tammany, and Tammany's symptoms, and Tammany's eventual answer. That the answer was only that they could do a little but not enough, that she would die, that the entire hellish marathon counted for nothing, punctured the last reserve of strength in each and every one of them.

The clock hand circled another few times while they answered questions from patient and family, mouthed the customary sympathies and waited out the tears until more questions surfaced. Tammany Hall took the news much as could be expected, and, helpful and sympathetic as they managed to be, there was an end of their responsibility towards the patient. She would be treated until stabilized, then released to continue treatment of what would be, essentially, a chronic albeit progressively debilitating illness over the next few years.

And four doctors could, finally, sleep.

Fifty-two hours after Tammany Hall arrived in the Princeton Plainsboro ER, her case was finally resolved. Fifty-two hours since any of those working on her case had slept, eaten well, bathed comfortably, or worn clean clothes. They were past the point of normal tiredness, even excessive tiredness, until their muscles responded jerkily like marionettes on strings, their vision punished them with the gritty clarity of a film noir, and gears ground stupidly in brains normally sharper than most. Everyone was shaking so badly from the caffeine intake they could barely sign out when they filed through the lobby, wondering that others around them seemed fresh and intense. They had all hours before surpassed that line between desperately needing rest and being too tired to sit still for it. Some time later else they had crossed another line, and now if they stopped moving even for a moment their exhaustion would claim them.

Kutner made it to his apartment but not his bed; made the mistake of pausing momentarily in his living room to remove his shoes, the sofa absorbed him and within seconds he was sleeping, facedown on the upholstery, one shoe still on his foot and the other slipping from the hand that dangled senseless to the floor.

Chase and Cameron stumbled into Chase's apartment – closer than Cameron's – and directly into the shower, not for sex but because neither could wait long enough for the other to get out. Cameron finished and dragged herself to bed, where she cried quietly so Chase could not hear her, until she heard the water shut off and feigned sleep. Chase could not erase the chafed feeling of two-day-old scrubs on his skin and braced himself against the tile until he had to turn the water on cold to wake up again. He heard Cameron's breathing hitch as he wound an arm around her waist but let her pretend she was asleep because nothing he said then would help her as much as a few hours of rest.

House sprawled in the armchair in his office, completely out. Wilson dropped by to offer a ride home, Cuddy walked in a bit later to ask about the paperwork for the case, and neither could bring themselves to wake him. Wilson moved House's cane from its precarious position in the sleeping doctor's hand, and turned out the light. Cuddy, a few minutes later, did not touch him, but moved silently through to the conference room and began to clear away the dregs of four days of grueling medicine.

Before she left, she set out empty coffee mugs and fresh case files for a patient being transferred from another hospital. She glanced through the long blinds to where House sprawled insensate, and paged Foreman, Taub, and Thirteen instead.

FIN

* * *

AN: Thanks for reading! Sorry not so much a happy ending, but modern medicine hasn't yet guaranteed those either. Have been less inspired by the new team than by the originals so my production's gone off, but I hope to have a new fic cooking in another week or so.


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